2012 In Gaming

You are here

Soon, outlets big and small — our site likely included — will share with you some thoughts on what the games of the year were. It’s not exactly a methodical thing, or consistent, or even particularly meaningful, but it can be fun to revisit and relive some of the best moments in games over the year, and 2012 will have its fair share. Game of the Year will be handed out. Spike TV will put on an abysmal television broadcast. Awards will grace shelves, and all will be as it ever is.

But 2012 also brought a lot of movement and change within the industry itself, sometimes defining moments and sometimes sweeping trends that carried throughout the year. What is in some ways more interesting to me is what 2012 has brought to consumers, developers and publishers as the business of gaming inches ever forward, evolving year after year.

Here then, are a few of my thoughts on the defining issues and moments of 2012 in video gaming.

Kickstarter and Crowdfunding: 2012 was, if nothing else, the year of crowdfunding. If began in February when Double Fine Studios did something that at the time seemed both bizarre and brilliant, which, to be honest, should not be all that surprising considering Tim Schafer’s penchant for being both brilliant and bizarre. It kicked off an effort to fund its next project, an adventure game no less, through Kickstarter. And it was as if the entire industry asked, “Wait! You can do that?”

Nearly $3.4 million dollars later, it would appear that yes, you can do that.

What was particularly interesting, though, was that it did not turn out to be an isolated event. Others immediately tried to replicate Double Fine’s success, and did. Of the ten current most funded projects on Kickstarter, seven of them are videogame related, and all of them happened this year. Ouya, Project Eternity, Wasteland, Star Citizen, along with Double Fine Adventure and numerous other projects saw a massive outpouring of support from the game community. Though very few of these funded games have actually been released, and there is no guarantee that anyone’s money spent to "kickstart" these projects will be a good investment, crowdfunding is still going strong, though perhaps not with the fervor of spring and summer.

Layoffs, Departures and Bankruptcy. Oh my!: For as good as things seemed to go for developers and game makers willing to explore non-traditional funding options, it turned out to be an ugly year for a lot of developers working within the more typical publisher model. It’s hard to believe it was only a couple of years ago that people used the term “recession proof” to describe the videogame industry.

Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios likely began the year on a high note, preparing to launch a big new game and already hard at work on the MMO to follow. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning hit store shelves in early February, and from that moment on a long, slow, painful and highly visible collapse began for the high-profile developer.

Whatever else you may be able to say, the one thing you really can’t say is that KoA:R was a bad game. It may not have been the best action-RPG ever conceived by man, but it had a lot going for it. However, whether a victim of the onerous publisher/developer model, a poster child for mismanagement, or doomed by a bad funding deal with the state of Rhode Island, the money went away far too quickly for 38 Studios, and in the end the company did what several others did in 2012. It fell into bankruptcy and died.

38 Studios was far from the only high profile gaming company in trouble. The once untouchable Zynga has suddenly become toxic. THQ seems perched on the knife’s edge of utter collapse, and is bleeding with layoffs and closures. Activision, Sony, Warner Brothers and Microsoft all announced major layoffs and closures of various sizes, to say nothing of countless development houses like Starbreeze and Funcom. Even Popcap wasn’t spared the sad news of lost jobs. Thousands of jobs ended for people at all levels of the gaming industry this year.

Still other jobs ended voluntarily(?) with multiple high-profile departures, not the least of which being the Doctors' Ray leaving BioWare. More recently Epic has been bleeding talent, with Cliff Blezinski most notably leaving the Gears of War developer, and now Mike Capps following suit. Of course departures are nothing new, but what's most troubling is the implication from many of these biggest names in gaming not just that they may be leaving their companies. They may be leaving the industry altogether.

WiiU Launches (also Vita): If the enthusiasm around the launch this year of the Wii U and the Vita is any indication, it’s not hard to see why there’s been such hesitation around kicking the next generation into high gear. I suppose it’s a bit subjective, and likely my opinion is informed by my utter apathy for both of these launches, but from the outside looking in, the tone and tenor has seemed decidedly muted. Consumers seemed far more interested in the latest iPad or newest phone than they did what might replace the aging Wii, which once had seemed to be on the verge of dominating all of gamingdom.

I feel like there’s something poignant and telling about a year in which Nintendo Power magazine finally closes its print doors within only a month of the launch of a new system. And who knows what 2013 may bring as Microsoft and Sony certainly consider their options for putting out new hardware, but right now the idea that a new generation should come seems more prescribed and perfunctory than driven by deep wells of consumer desire.

One can almost smell the coming headlines of the death of the consoles as they once wrote about the death of PC. They will, again, be wrong of course, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to deny that the industry is cyclical, and I still remember the gaming crash of the 1980s.

Curse of the 3: If your game had a 3 in the title this year, then you probably had some dark days. Or weeks. Or months.

Mass Effect 3 was BioWare’s highly anticipated climatic swan song for one of the most prized series in gaming. But, like a nervous gymnast who cracks under the pressure of competition, they botched the dismount and, some would argue, landed flat on their face. The outcry and even outrage from gamers around the ending of Mass Effect 3 was almost unbelievable, and whatever BioWare may say about their satisfaction with the narrative, it is telling that they could not move fast enough to create DLC to “clarify” the story.

Diablo 3 would fare no better in the eyes of fans. Mired in controversy around Real Money Auction House transactions, the lack of offline modes of play, and a brief, ill-fated idea by Blizzard to limit people who purchased the game digitally to a glorified demo for the first 3 days, it seemed Blizzard could do no right with one of the most important franchises in gaming history. But, in the long run, Diablo 3 remains successful and is one of the top-selling games of the year with an expansion already in the works. Many of the most vocal raising concern around the actions of Blizzard are those who spent tens or hundreds of hours combing through the dark in search of the elusive epic loot. It’s tough to say how much money the RMAH has generated for Blizzard, but even a cursory glance shows no shortage of players eager to exchange hard-earned greenbacks for the one piece of equipment that will finally make their character all powerful.

Still, there is no denying that Blizzard continues to lose goodwill with its fanbase, and has been on a steady downward trajectory that seems all the more marked since its union with Activision.

Max Payne 3 did not suffer the same kind of poor PR hits and gamer outrage as Diablo 3 and Mass Effect 3. In fact, what it suffered was almost no gamer interest at all, or at least not in the volume that Rockstar and Take Two were expecting. The one thing you can’t say about the other two games is that they sold poorly, but In its earnings report following Max Payne 3’s release, Take Two specifically called out the game as an under-performer and a key reason the company fell short. The publisher couldn’t talk quickly enough about how great a year 2013 was going to be with games like BioShock Infinite, and investors shouldn’t pay any attention at all to the fact that, despite being a good, generally well reviewed game, Max Payne 3 just couldn’t seem to get anyone to care about it.

Even Assassin’s Creed 3 was not impervious to the struggles of games-with-a-3-in-the-name. Though AC3 seemed poised to break the trend, it’s launch was surprisingly buggy, and the fan response was inconsistent. Some loved it, others not so much, and universally everyone seemed to agree that it started painfully slow. Though it probably fared the best out of the bunch, AC3 still managed to find several ways to disappoint.

E-Sports: Depending on how the industry chooses to look at it, E-sports are either a growing cultural shift that is on the precipice of being mainstream entertainment, or a niche market with sketchy ROI and an underwhelming revenue model. For viewers, though, events like Dreamhack, MLG or The International DOTA 2 tournament have become must-see Intenet TV, as people who don't even play many of the games featured watched in the millions. It’s hard not to imagine E-sports as a force to be reckoned with, watching final matches that have packed arenas of cheering, screaming, tech-savvy fans. This year continued to see the movement’s growth as League of Legends and DOTA 2 continued to build upon the enthusiasm that Starcraft 2 helped lead in 2011.

While the technology and infrastructure to deliver content to potential fans has steadily improved, the costs match pace, and there are some rumblings of concerns about when these tournaments will really begin to generate sustainable revenue beyond investors. E-sports is truly a world of the 1-percenters, with a small fraction of gamers and game teams soaking up the vast majority of the big prizes, and many of the remaining professional gamers and their sponsors struggling to stay afloat. While the year has certainly seen a lot of growth, it has also seen a few major team collapses, and a lot of the strongest Korean players increasingly less willing to play in the “foreign” tournaments. The effort is gaining a sizable fanbase, this year more than ever before it seems, but it still has a lot of questions to solve.

I hope the community can break through before investors lose faith.

An Old Debate Quieted: I bring up this last issue not because it was a defining item of 2012, but precisely because it wasn’t. I don’t quite know when it happened, but the hot-button issue of games as a negative influence on kids/society/morality/violence/whatever has seemed to evaporate like so much morning fog under the noon-day sun.

2012 had several tragic and heartbreaking incidents that have traditionally launched pundits and talk-show junkies into bloated tirades on the horrible influence video games have on our society. And yet, it never materialized. At least not with any real, lasting oomph, as it has in previous years.

I don’t know if there are broad conclusions to draw from that, or whether 2013 will see the proselytizing vigorously renew. For now, it seems that video gaming as a menace to society is a topic that has fallen out of favor. And it gives me some hope, not only that people aren’t demonizing the medium, but perhaps some are even beginning to see that it can be a beneficial, an informing, an inspiring practice.

Comments

Pages

I would be far more interested in esports if they hyped games that weren't top-down. Yes it's easier to stream Starcraft and League of Legends, but the real excitement for me comes from seeing teammates collaborate from their own limited perspectives. If CS:GO went professional, for instance, watching and hearing how those teams operate would be far more entertaining than whether a Starcraft expert adapts his build order correctly when his scout spots something.

If you go back a little more than a year, you can add Uncharted 3 and God of War 3 to the list of titles with "3" at the end that disappointed me. I think 2012 was the year I became really disinterested in the AAA games industry. Like way more than usual.

If CS:GO went professional, for instance, watching and hearing how those teams operate would be far more entertaining than whether a Starcraft expert adapts his build order correctly when his scout spots something.

Black Ops and more recently Halo 4 do this decently, but I actually find them frustrating to watch. The problem being it's like showing a broadcast while 10 different cameras zoom around in different directions with no predictability around which one has the interesting content. FPS games really haven't solved the TV problem yet of being something that can be viewed effectively as a 3rd party observer.

The thing about smart people is they seem like crazy people to dumb people -- Thing I saw on the Internet

If CS:GO went professional, for instance, watching and hearing how those teams operate would be far more entertaining than whether a Starcraft expert adapts his build order correctly when his scout spots something.

Black Ops and more recently Halo 4 do this decently, but I actually find them frustrating to watch. The problem being it's like showing a broadcast while 10 different cameras zoom around in different directions with no predictability around which one has the interesting content. FPS games really haven't solved the TV problem yet of being something that can be viewed effectively as a 3rd party observer.

Just taking a shot at this: I know that, as a former CS player, being able to see a top-down map of players after I died was usually pretty interesting. If that could be linked with users being able to select the camera of any active player ... I'm not sure that's the solution, but I think the path might lie in that direction.

Just taking a shot at this: I know that, as a former CS player, being able to see a top-down map of players after I died was usually pretty interesting. If that could be linked with users being able to select the camera of any active player ... I'm not sure that's the solution, but I think the path might lie in that direction.

Based on that, I'm suddenly thinking a top-down view like Alien Swarm or Frozen Synapse would be a good way of presenting it (with LOS cones), but isn't that just shoving an FPS into the same viewpoint as an RTS?

Also, more importantly, there's a degree of z-axis play in FPS games. A top-down camera angle pretty much kills any chance of showing that properly.

Just taking a shot at this: I know that, as a former CS player, being able to see a top-down map of players after I died was usually pretty interesting. If that could be linked with users being able to select the camera of any active player ... I'm not sure that's the solution, but I think the path might lie in that direction.

Based on that, I'm suddenly thinking a top-down view like Alien Swarm or Frozen Synapse would be a good way of presenting it (with LOS cones), but isn't that just shoving an FPS into the same viewpoint as an RTS?

I don't know if it was via mod or what, but this is what I remember seeing after dying on some servers. I think it was just tacked in as a view as you were cycling through live players' views.

Based on that, I'm suddenly thinking a top-down view like Alien Swarm or Frozen Synapse would be a good way of presenting it (with LOS cones), but isn't that just shoving an FPS into the same viewpoint as an RTS?

Also, more importantly, there's a degree of z-axis play in FPS games. A top-down camera angle pretty much kills any chance of showing that properly.

They should do what is done for hockey, soccer, and any other sport without frequent breaks (NFL football, basketball): use a moving and rotating isometric view most of the time, let us hear one team's radio channel or the other, and then switch to key players' perspectives for critical moments and for instant replay and analysis.

Elysium wrote:

Black Ops and more recently Halo 4 do this decently, but I actually find them frustrating to watch. The problem being it's like showing a broadcast while 10 different cameras zoom around in different directions with no predictability around which one has the interesting content. FPS games really haven't solved the TV problem yet of being something that can be viewed effectively as a 3rd party observer.

If they introduce a 30-second tape delay during which time they determine which angles would be best, problem solved.

They should do what is done for hockey, soccer, and any other sport without frequent breaks (NFL football, basketball):

I agree, but of course most sports are played in a highly limited field of play that happens to be geometrically compatible to spectating. Usually in relatively two dimensions. I'm trying to imagine this working with the complex environments of an FPS. You still have multiple clusters of action that are, by design, segmented out and placed within a variety of architectural types.

The thing about smart people is they seem like crazy people to dumb people -- Thing I saw on the Internet

You still have multiple clusters of action that are, by design, segmented out and placed within a variety of architectural types.

Something like the death maps Valve did for TF2 and Half-Life 2 Ep 2 would go a long way toward eSports videos figuring out where to pre-place cameras in order to capture footage from a good angle. Of course, this requires servers to report this data back to a central server for crunching, but it'd be really helpful I imagine.

I think the other problem is that FPS games tend to be like watching hunting footage. Sure, there's some big moments like getting a kill, but unlike RTS there's an awful lot of downtime between moments. At least with RTS/MOBA the players are actively doing things like base building and creep killing. FPS is just... running around, maybe getting powerups / health kits?

I think there's a reason you see more "kill reels" than professional match footage + commentary coming out of FPS games.

I have something to add that changed for me personally. This was the year that I unsubscribed to almost all the video game news site RSS feeds in my Google Reader. The awful Mass Effect 3 coverage is what broke the camels back but it had been building for a while.

More and more I found better information and thoughts from developers, forum goers, podcasters, quicklooks, live streams and YouTube channels.

And if there was actually an article worth reading, I would see people linking to it on Twitter, Reddit and forums.

I can't say that this happened to a lot of people so it's not a trend but 2012 had great output in terms of just quality Quicklooks. I found watching someone play a game and seeing if it's for me far more valuable than reading a snark filled, hyperbolic hype piece on a news site or blog.

I look forward to the quality of content to be even better in 2013, especially with the GWJ cast and crew doing more "GWJ Plays" videos

I've put more hours into Tribes:Ascend, Mechwarrior Online, and Planetside 2 than I'd care to admit, and these games also earned a couple dollars from me. Really excited to see how these properties evolve in the new year.

Also of note, the rise in social consciousness in and around gaming, and backlash against women and minorities asserting their place at the table.

Yup, in particular women. Between the ugly arguments that arose over Anita Sarkeesian's Kickstarter project, Fake Geek Girls, #1 Reason Why and another catalyst that I'm not remembering for some reason, this seems to be the year that people have been discussing women in and their representation within the games industry.

I have something to add that changed for me personally. This was the year that I unsubscribed to almost all the video game news site RSS feeds in my Google Reader. The awful Mass Effect 3 coverage is what broke the camels back but it had been building for a while.

More and more I found better information and thoughts from developers, forum goers, podcasters, quicklooks, live streams and YouTube channels.

And if there was actually an article worth reading, I would see people linking to it on Twitter, Reddit and forums.

I can't say that this happened to a lot of people so it's not a trend but 2012 had great output in terms of just quality Quicklooks. I found watching someone play a game and seeing if it's for me far more valuable than reading a snark filled, hyperbolic hype piece on a news site or blog.

I look forward to the quality of content to be even better in 2013, especially with the GWJ cast and crew doing more "GWJ Plays" videos :D

The thing I always remember now is (Sean's) bias article. Everyone has their bias, their angle, their reason for putting up the article they do. There's pretty much no 'right' source of information in almost any field, so you've got to understand where it's coming from and adjust or calibrate your reading of it.

I made this comment in another thread, but I'd argue that 2012 could be called the most disappointing year in gaming. I feel like a lot of hardware and titles never fully panned-out.

Mass Effect 3 was definitely a learning experience. If there are ever books written about games as art, business or reflections of society, I imagine the ME3 chapter will be exceptional. If for nothing else, it was utterly surreal to see the mainstream press so far removed from the opinions of such a large segment of fans. Personally, I lost a lot of respect for the reviewers who suggested that the critics of the game, especially its ending, were acting like petulant children.

It also brought up an as-yet unresolved issue in gaming: is the story of a game too sacred to be patched?

F2P games also are something to consider in 2012, but maybe this trend started since 2011 or before...

I think this is the first year they've really started to get popular in the public eye though. TF2 went F2P, big budget games like Hawken and Planetside 2 started getting huge buzz, and League of Legends has continued its crazy upward spiral to becoming the most played game in the world.

I would be far more interested in esports if they hyped games that weren't top-down. Yes it's easier to stream Starcraft and League of Legends, but the real excitement for me comes from seeing teammates collaborate from their own limited perspectives. If CS:GO went professional, for instance, watching and hearing how those teams operate would be far more entertaining than whether a Starcraft expert adapts his build order correctly when his scout spots something.

I can't imagine watching a sport with the perspective limited being fun. Top down games work far better, to me, because they mimic the sports I watch. And I'd rather watch an FPS from a God view than from player perspective.

ccesarano wrote:

Tanglebones wrote:

Also of note, the rise in social consciousness in and around gaming, and backlash against women and minorities asserting their place at the table.

Yup, in particular women. Between the ugly arguments that arose over Anita Sarkeesian's Kickstarter project, Fake Geek Girls, #1 Reason Why and another catalyst that I'm not remembering for some reason, this seems to be the year that people have been discussing women in and their representation within the games industry.

Yeah, this is the counterweight to Elysiums Old Debate Quieted point. There's a new one, being generated from inside the culture, and it's real. Unlike the 'danger of games' nonsense.

Mass Effect 3 was definitely a learning experience. If there are ever books written about games as art, business or reflections of society, I imagine the ME3 chapter will be exceptional. If for nothing else, it was utterly surreal to see the mainstream press so far removed from the opinions of such a large segment of fans. Personally, I lost a lot of respect for the reviewers who suggested that the critics of the game, especially its ending, were acting like petulant children.

I think it was the Blizzard fanbase effect more than anything else.

Whenever Blizzard makes a change, a few hundred of their "fans" come out and proclaim that it's the worst thing ever, it will kill the game, killed their dog, set fire to their hose, and because of that, they're never buying anything that they make ever again.

It completely dominates the conversation about the patch, and utterly destroys any constructive conversation to be had about the changes.

And the worst part about it is that the vast majority of the complainers have never seen the content that Blizzard's changing.

I think the same thing happened with ME3. There certainly were mechanical issues with the ending, particularly in how it was originally presented, but I honestly think that this was a case of a very vocal subset of fans complaining about the content that they hadn't gotten to yet.

If the backlash was nearly as bad as you're implying, Bioware would have dropped support for the game completely. They wouldn't be releasing new multiplayer content, nor would there be any more DLC. Even now, Bioware's been making weekly multiplayer balance patches, and monthly content drops. That kind of support simply wouldn't exist if the segment of fans who Bioware "lost" was that large.

clockworkhouse wrote:

Buncha fun haters around here...

dimmerswitch wrote:

When you really get down to it, isn't a hearse really just an unsuccessful ambulance?

Mass Effect 3 was definitely a learning experience. If there are ever books written about games as art, business or reflections of society, I imagine the ME3 chapter will be exceptional. If for nothing else, it was utterly surreal to see the mainstream press so far removed from the opinions of such a large segment of fans. Personally, I lost a lot of respect for the reviewers who suggested that the critics of the game, especially its ending, were acting like petulant children.

I think it was the Blizzard fanbase effect more than anything else.

Whenever Blizzard makes a change, a few hundred of their "fans" come out and proclaim that it's the worst thing ever, it will kill the game, killed their dog, set fire to their hose, and because of that, they're never buying anything that they make ever again.

It completely dominates the conversation about the patch, and utterly destroys any constructive conversation to be had about the changes.

And the worst part about it is that the vast majority of the complainers have never seen the content that Blizzard's changing.

I think the same thing happened with ME3. There certainly were mechanical issues with the ending, particularly in how it was originally presented, but I honestly think that this was a case of a very vocal subset of fans complaining about the content that they hadn't gotten to yet.

If the backlash was nearly as bad as you're implying, Bioware would have dropped support for the game completely. They wouldn't be releasing new multiplayer content, nor would there be any more DLC. Even now, Bioware's been making weekly multiplayer balance patches, and monthly content drops. That kind of support simply wouldn't exist if the segment of fans who Bioware "lost" was that large.

I was thinking about that last night actually as I fired up the ME3 multiplayer. I think the reason Bioware continues to update the multiplayer has a lot to do with the micro-transaction store. I suspect it must be a cash cow for them, otherwise, you are right, they would stop supporting it. Bear in mind that the backlash was so significant that Bioware released an amended ending. Their people made a business decision to address the criticism by investing money in new content. It's hard to argue that the backlash wasn't significant given Bioware's immediate reaction. I'd be fascinated to see how the single player DLC packs performed. In GWJ, I haven't seen as many conversations about the ME3 DLC's than the ME2 DLC's. I wouldn't be shocked if the SP stuff didn't do very well.

You still have multiple clusters of action that are, by design, segmented out and placed within a variety of architectural types.

Something like the death maps Valve did for TF2 and Half-Life 2 Ep 2 would go a long way toward eSports videos figuring out where to pre-place cameras in order to capture footage from a good angle. Of course, this requires servers to report this data back to a central server for crunching, but it'd be really helpful I imagine.

I think the other problem is that FPS games tend to be like watching hunting footage. Sure, there's some big moments like getting a kill, but unlike RTS there's an awful lot of downtime between moments. At least with RTS/MOBA the players are actively doing things like base building and creep killing. FPS is just... running around, maybe getting powerups / health kits?

I think there's a reason you see more "kill reels" than professional match footage + commentary coming out of FPS games.

I think one of the main reasons is that developers aren't creating FPS type games with spectators in mind. We won't have good watchable FPS matches until the game is made from the ground up to keep viewers interested.

It also interests me that Esports spectating is growing closer and closer to the TV sports model. With all the possibilities, we're still left with more of the same.

Maybe next year will become the year of the spectator with all the advances that the MOBA genre are pushing.

I haven't touched single player me3 on months. After that first face patch, I gave my imported femShep a try. But knowing the ending, I could never push through.

Still fire up the multiplayer every week or two. It's fun. They are two separate things. I also played the crap out of the multiplayer demo before release. There's a solid co-op experience there.

I really enjoyed the multiplayer too, but it seems like I cannot get through an entire match without disconnecting from the EA servers now. Really frustrating going 9 rounds then getting disconnected and earning nothing. (I'm an old IT guy and believe me I've tried everything under the sun to try and remedy this issue to no avail.)

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up" - C.S. Lewis

Now that I've read the article, while I'd definitely say "year of crowdfunding" the fact is that this is the first year it went big in the games space. Indie games like Natural Selection, Xenonauts, and other titles have been asking fans for money in exchange for alpha/beta access for a while now. Some, like Grim Dawn, even went ahead and ran a KS campaign to tap into that sweet, sweet, gold rush that happened this year.

*removes three scarves*

Hipsterism aside, this was the year where it became a proven funding strategy for larger firms like Double Fine, Obisidian, inXile, and brought a ton of players out of the woodwork. This in my mind is definitely a good thing, since this might be part of the solution to saving mid-sized games (ie. not indie or AAA), the loss of which was something Cliff Bleszinski cautioned people about at GDC a year or two ago.

I'm glad the gold rush is dying down, but we're already seeing the fruits of it with titles like Natural Selection, Ghiana Sisters, and FTL reaching Steam in the last few months.

Dyni wrote:

I think this is the first year they've really started to get popular in the public eye though. TF2 went F2P, big budget games like Hawken and Planetside 2 started getting huge buzz, and League of Legends has continued its crazy upward spiral to becoming the most played game in the world.

Much like crowd-funding, I agree this was the year where F2P went AAA/mainstream in the West. It's only been 18 months since Steam started offering F2P games, but F2P has been a profitable business plan in Asia and among smaller Western (mostly indie) games.

ccesarano wrote:

Yeah, this is the counterweight to Elysiums Old Debate Quieted point. There's a new one, being generated from inside the culture, and it's real. Unlike the 'danger of games' nonsense.

I think this year in Video Games to me can be summed up as "The Deep Inhale" for major publishers and developers.

Everyone seems to be in a holding pattern and jittery, waiting for the first shoe to drop. Cynicism, fan backlash and disinterest in sequels and new hardware seems to be the big thing sticking out to me this year.

Even though the 3DS came out before this year, it seems like it it can be lumped into the disinterest zone (although not as much as Vita and Wii U). It's like most of the major console players are holding their breath just waiting for the "next-Next Gen" to come out and stimulate interest and their bases.

I think this year in Video Games to me can be summed up as "The Deep Inhale" for major publishers and developers.

Everyone seems to be in a holding pattern and jittery, waiting for the first shoe to drop. Cynicism, fan backlash and disinterest in sequels and new hardware seems to be the big thing sticking out to me this year.

Even though the 3DS came out before this year, it seems like it it can be lumped into the disinterest zone (although not as much as Vita and Wii U). It's like most of the major console players are holding their breath just waiting for the "next-Next Gen" to come out and stimulate interest and their bases.

I think that's going to be very interesting to see in 6-18 months time. There's the "if you build it they will come" approach to releasing big new stuff, but I think now you can't ignore the "what if nobody came?" scenario that has to be considered. More likely, companies don't expect massive adoption straight away, that early efforts into new hardware will be a loss leader for later on, but how long is that 'later' going to be? Is it too risky to drop support for this-gen quickly?

I think the same thing happened with ME3. There certainly were mechanical issues with the ending, particularly in how it was originally presented, but I honestly think that this was a case of a very vocal subset of fans complaining about the content that they hadn't gotten to yet.

Everyone I saw complaining had finished the game. I thought, with my first playthrough with my Big Dumb Shepard who didn't always make the right choice and didn't always understand the implications of what he wanted to do, that I had gotten the 'lousy' ending, the one that made little sense and was disconnected from the main plot. I thought I was, in essence, being pseudo-punished for playing suboptimally and not doing any multiplayer.

It wasn't until I was partway through another playthrough, with my Optimized Female Shepard, that I realized that everyone got the same three endings.

edit: this was pretty long, but I'll shorten it to this paragraph:

It doesn't fundamentally matter to me anymore what Bioware does with the property. They've shattered my belief in their universe. That ending was so obviously wrong that the whole story broke in my head, and it doesn't matter what they do with the ending, I still won't believe it. It's now obvious to me that there was no coherent story from the beginning; they didn't really know where they were going when they started. The story lacked integrity, in the sense of having structure and coherence. They threw many balls in the air and dropped almost all of them, through the simple expedient of ignoring everything you ever did, in a game about choice. Sorry, Bioware, no sale. Not buying it. And you've been demoted from Day Zero to about Day 180.

"I've been playing Rebel Galaxy for the past few days. It has made me appreciate every other game in the genre more." -- Flintheart Glomgold

It wasn't until I was partway through another playthrough, with my Optimized Female Shepard, that I realized that everyone got the same three endings.

Um, they did that with ME1 and ME2.

Spoiling this for the people that care.

Spoiler:

You do realize that there were essentially 4 outcomes in the ME1:

1. Don't save the council. They get replaced by new councilors.
2. Don't save the council. They get replaced by humanity.
3. Save the council, put Anderson as councilor.
4. Save the council, put Udina as councilor.

Those are, quite literally, the last 2 choices you make in the game. Totally binary, in fact.

ME2 had, again, 4 ending combinations:

First was the choice for the collector base. If you decided to save it, it was a blue blast. Otherwise, it was a regular explosion that destroyed the entire thing. Shepard is still shown to run out of the collector base.

The final cutscene is dependent on whether you saved everyone, where the last cutscene was Shepard walking through the entirety of the Normandy, or you didn't in which case it's Shepard standing in front of caskets.

So no, I don't see this argument as any different from ANY of Bioware's other games, especially in regards to Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2(DAO is really the only game where every one of your decisions matters with the ending). Going back further, Jade Empire and KotOR's endings both hinged 100% on your last decision.

clockworkhouse wrote:

Buncha fun haters around here...

dimmerswitch wrote:

When you really get down to it, isn't a hearse really just an unsuccessful ambulance?

It comes down to how much choice and consequence you give the player, and how the game responds to that. My overall impression is that they bit off more than they could chew, and also I get the feeling that they changed plan quite a bit over the years, with the pros and cons that brings.

They can't do wildly divergent paths through 3 games, and I don't think any expected that, rather it to be a bit elastic along the path